This update may not kill your servers right away because it is still summer vacation. Right now there is a shakeup in community players with some communities closing, and a few players favoriting your server when casual mode wasn't working properly for a week. But as you have noticed yourself servers now seem to be prone to suddenly emptying out. When summer vacation ends, people will not so easily refill your server and those new players won't last forever. It is now impossible to compete with Valve on vanilla servers now that people can only get ranked on them.
Now we all have to run 32 slot instant respawn spam-fests like No-Heroes and every other weird plugin... which are the very reasons that people on Reddit and Steam complain about. MOTD ad companies aren't at the mercy of the TF team anymore unlike the rest of us here, they've already diversified into other games such as CS:GO, Gmod, Minecraft. They will keep offering TF2 advertisements until the very end. Trying to hype up community servers won't do anything. Half of the community server owners here hate the other half, as you can see by Mr. Olsen here who never fails to falsely suggest that servers with ads are the cause of every community killing update. Community servers used to have most of the players now, but now we are a small minority due to years of being locked out of traffic, so trying to get the TF team to panic by sheer number of complaints is impossible. It is up to the TF team to realize that they cannot copy Overwatch and CS:GO to success. They had strong community servers and now they are throwing the last of them away and doing a bait and switch on people that bought the game to play/host their own servers.
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